American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  “Snitches,” my sister repeated, saying it dreamily.

  And that was that. The conversation is tattooed on my mind because it was one of the last the three of us had before Agathe came back here to Martinique permanently, taking along with her suitcases our blue one.

  For a long time I was furious with her. I thought: How could she leave her family? Pop wasn’t that bad, as if that were a reasonable way to measure a life spent with someone.

  I think the damage done to her by being forced to pass couldn’t be undone, and she eventually came to feel like the only place she could truly be herself was here in Martinique. That’s the narrative I’ve imposed on her departure anyway, to answer the questions that nagged at me.

  I carried the hurt from her abandonment into my adulthood. I was angry with Agathe for years; I resented having to grow up as fast as we did without her. I spent my adolescence finding one excuse after another not to respond to her letters or speak to her during one of her rare phone calls.

  I have empathy for her now that I’m an adult, but the effect her departure had on me can’t be undone either. I’ve always promised myself that I would avoid her mistake with my own children. That I would never leave you, ever, no matter what. For a long time, the worst thing I could’ve imagined was the circumstances I find myself in. Now that I’m about to do exactly that.

  4

  NEW YORK, 1987

  I WAS ONE OF ONLY A HANDFUL of agents who deigned to live in the city, most of the others being family men who commuted from the suburbs. I had a big, bright apartment on the corner of 128th and Lenox, in a four-story brick building with a rickety fire escape draped down the front.

  After work the next evening, I changed out of my suit, got a drink, and clicked on the television. Settled in on my sofa—it was a good find, a gray midcentury piece that I’d bought in an Indiana antiques shop and brought with me when I’d moved.

  I watched TV for a little bit, then turned my attention to the half-dozen pin tumbler locks laid out on the coffee table. I’d learned how to pick a lock at Quantico and found it to be a surprisingly satisfying skill to practice. As I was raking one of them, the phone rang just once. Pop’s code. My father always rang, hung up, and then immediately called back under the misguided assumption that knowing it was him would make me more inclined to pick up. When the phone sounded again I hesitated through a few rings before crossing to it. “Hello?”

  “Your buzzer doesn’t work,” he said.

  “You’re downstairs?”

  “At the pay phone on the corner.”

  I told him I’d be there in just a second, put on slippers, and went down to let him in.

  “You look very comfortable,” my father said when I opened the front door. I was wearing a pair of red gym shorts with white piping and a tank top—it was muggy out and I hadn’t been expecting to see him.

  He was dressed carefully, but in a manner designed to suggest casualness. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, a tan driving cap, and matching tan Top-Siders—what he called his Jack Kennedy shoes. I noticed the Omega watch on his wrist; he’d bought it in a Quantico gift shop when he’d come down for my FBI graduation.

  He followed me up the worn stairs to the top floor and into my apartment, where I quickly pulled on a pair of jeans. I returned to the living room to find him looking around my place. I did the same, hoping to figure out what he’d comment on first—because he’d arrived unannounced, his visit felt like a surprise inspection. There was an enormous stack of newspapers on my dining table that I quickly tried to neaten. I compulsively read the news in both English and French papers. I was interested in the world outside of my own tiny corner of it.

  My father pointed to a spot in the wall above one of my tall bookshelves that was split by a deep crack. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “It’s been there forever.”

  “I could come by one day with some compound and fix it.”

  “It’s fine, Pop.” I went to the coffee table and returned the locks to the wicker basket I kept them in.

  “How’s that kitchen sink of yours? Still only hot water coming out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had a plumber come out to the house last week to put in a new hot water heater. We got to talking a little. I told him about you.”

  “What’d you tell him? That I’m a Fed?”

  He shook his head and smiled. “Not the kind of thing you start with, not with a brother like him. Nice young brother though. He could really do well for himself if someone gave him a chance.”

  He was always trying to set me up. I never had a problem getting dates, but the pattern of my romantic life was clear: At some point I’d realize I strongly preferred my own company to the company of the man I happened to be seeing. Things tended to go sharply downhill from there.

  There are only two men I never felt that way about: your father, who’s widely considered to be one of the most inspiring men of his generation, and Robbie Young, who most assuredly isn’t. Boys, I can’t explain the gulf there, and believe me, I’ve thought about it a lot.

  He wasn’t concerned that I was lonely, he was worried that if I couldn’t find a man, I couldn’t give him grandchildren. I didn’t share his anxiety. I always knew I’d have children eventually. I was ecstatic when you were born, the happiest I’d ever been. I’d been waiting for you my whole life.

  “I could give him your phone number,” he added. “Maybe he could fix that faucet of yours. Take you out for a bite afterward.”

  “No, Pop,” I said testily, and frowned at my father. There they were in record time: those first pinpricks of irritation that always accompanied one of his visits. He was extremely proud of the fact that I was a college graduate, and was just as proud, although he’d never admit it, that military service had only temporarily interrupted his own education. While he was still a beat cop he’d gone to night school to earn his bachelor’s degree. During the years he’d spent working his way up the ranks, he’d also earned a master’s from Hunter. And after he’d been promoted to the office of the commissioner, he’d pursued a law degree at St. John’s University.

  It was annoying, the way he persisted in presenting me with men he wanted me to drag up, to inspire to pursue the same course of education. Never mind that spending so much energy on someone else meant having precious little left for myself.

  My father was standing at the window now, looking at the ficus standing beside it. I had a number of plants in my living room, my talent for their care being something I inherited from your grandmother. “Soil looks a bit dry.”

  I knew it wasn’t, but shrugged and went to the kitchen to fill a pitcher anyway. As I crossed back toward the plant, Pop looked up and out the window. I reminded myself that he loved me. He wasn’t subjecting me to an unending drumbeat of criticism, not from his perspective. He was trying to show me he cared.

  “I should go down and fix that, shouldn’t I?”

  I looked up from the plant and followed his gaze down to Lenox Avenue. He’d gotten a great space—his old blue Volkswagen Beetle was parked directly in front of the building, but its behind was jutting out. “It’s not worth it,” I said, and to distract him, added: “The Bean Can’s getting up there, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, still looking down on the car. “Eighteen years I’ve had it now.” He’d been talking about buying a new car for years, and although he could afford something flashier, he hesitated. He’d fit a profile in a more expensive one.

  “Eighteen? It’ll finally be able to vote.”

  He smiled weakly, and I knew his mind was still on going down there and parking it perfectly. I found my sympathy for him in the knowledge that he was harder on himself than he was on anyone else, including me.

  Now he was looking at the other side of the avenue, to the party store there. A stocky man was sitting out front
on a milk crate, the radio on the ground near his sneakers blasting a Chaka Khan song. The upbeat music didn’t match the grim look on Pop’s face.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m just coming from the hospital.”

  I nodded, assuming he’d gone to visit my grandfather. A few days earlier, he’d walked the short distance from his Brooklyn brownstone to Interfaith Hospital where they’d found he had a chest infection and checked him in. I asked, “Did he tell you I was there yesterday?”

  “Were you?”

  “He was in a really bad mood, Pop. I think he was in a lot of pain. He wouldn’t admit it though.”

  “He’s not in all that pain anymore.”

  “That’s good. Did they tell you when they’re going to discharge him?”

  He was still looking out the window. A few long moments passed before he finally spoke: “Harlem’s really gone to shit.”

  “Pop, did you hear me? When’s Grandpa getting out of the hospital?”

  He turned toward me with his brows furrowed, and it occurred to me then why he’d come. What he’d meant by saying that my grandfather was no longer in pain. The news sent me reeling; I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. As the pressure of tears mounted behind my eyes, I felt myself getting angry. I hated how he always managed to blindside me. This was a problem in how we communicated that had always been there.

  I went to the kitchen and returned to the living room with a bottle of wine and two glasses. I sat on the sofa. “You want a drink?”

  “Yeah, I could do with a little taste on the place.”

  The question had been a formality. Of course he wanted one. I was my father’s daughter. When I handed him his glass, he held it up to the light, and I observed him observing it, feeling the weight of his judgment on me. Pop had an oenophile streak that I considered either sophisticated or precious depending on my mood, and at that moment I didn’t have the patience for it.

  I sipped from my glass. I think we both understood we should’ve been filling the silence stretching between us with watercolor memories, but neither of us was sentimental enough. Instead we drank.

  I’m sorry you’ll never get to meet my grandfather, who was a quiet force of nature. He was known in the neighborhood for his motorcycle—I learned how to ride one from him—and his dog, Marmaduke, who’d died the year before. Whenever I’m over there, people still introduce me as Mr. Mitchell’s granddaughter.

  He’d immigrated to New York from Barbados in the thirties and worked in a grocery owned by a Jewish couple for a decade before saving up enough for a store in the south Bronx (at the time the family lived in Harlem; the move to Brooklyn was a step up that came much later). I have no idea how he accomplished all that he did. You have to understand that this was at a time when they wouldn’t even have served him a meal at the Woolworth’s counter, but he managed to own his own business and his home, having bought it with the help of a West Indian credit union.

  “You remember Marmaduke?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Of course. How’d you know he’d love that dog so much?”

  “I didn’t, I just thought he was lonely in the brownstone. Actually, I was worried he’d hate him. Sheryl offered to get him a dog before I even thought of it,” I said, meaning one of my play cousins. “He turned her down. He told me, ‘She would’ve bought a mutt, and I don’t want no mutt in my house.’ So I got him a purebred and hoped for the best.”

  Marmaduke had been a fox terrier, what the old folks in the neighborhood had called a Thin Man dog, because he’d looked like the one in the detective movie. And Sheryl had felt slighted, but who cared? He’d made Grandpa happy.

  “He would’ve loved any dog you got him. He loved you.”

  I was embarrassed—I knew he’d loved me, but it was uncomfortable to hear my father say it. We didn’t talk to each other like that. I took a drink and changed the subject to a funny story. “You remember the time Grandpa had people over to the house for a get-together and Marmaduke bit the only white guest?”

  He laughed and nodded. He’d emptied his glass, so I uncorked the bottle and poured us both a little more. He took a sip and said, “He left the brownstone to you.”

  “What?”

  “Like I said. He loved you.”

  I was surprised, although in retrospect I see there’d been a single, subtle indication of what he’d been planning. Out of the blue one day, he’d asked me what I would do with it, if it were mine. Would you sell it? he’d asked. I told him no, that I’d keep it for my kids, and he’d smiled and said, Good. We have to own things, girl, we have to pass them down.

  “Do you want it?” I asked. My grandfather’s choice probably felt like a slap in the face to my father.

  “I’ve known for a while he was leaving it to you. I’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea. And anyway, he wanted you to have it, so you should have it. You know the woman across the street?”

  “Geneva?”

  “That’s the one.”

  She owned two buildings on the block, and as a teenager I used to watch her striding back and forth between them. One day, I worked up the nerve to ask her a few questions about her business, and she humored me. I still appreciate that. I had no one in my life who could really teach me about money. Pop had middle-class values: He taught me to pay my taxes in full, depend on a salary, and to avoid debt at all costs. Agathe and I never talked about money—not once—and she never worked outside the home, but the fact that she had to have squirreled some away to come back to Martinique connected money and autonomy in my mind. Robbie thought money was the root of all evil (which I took as a poor excuse for why he never had any); Helene saw money as power.

  He told me how much Geneva was selling her brownstone for and added, “Yours is the same size, but in better shape. I think you could get more for it.”

  “I want to hang on to it.”

  Pop finished off the last of his wine. He nodded. “He said he knew he could depend on you to take care of it. He knew I’d just sell it.” As he talked about the arrangements he’d have to make with the funeral home and crematory, I asked him how I could help out.

  “I’ve got everything taken care of,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, it’s no problem. Jim’s been helping. When was the last time you and him touched base, by the way?”

  “It’s been awhile,” I admitted, thinking of Mr. Ali in his office, squinting at his word processor through reading glasses.

  “I don’t see why you can’t give him a call. Get lunch together.”

  “I will, Pop.”

  “I mean you’re right there in the same office.”

  “All right, Pop.”

  I realized I wanted him to leave. I wanted to be alone with the news he’d given me. He must’ve sensed it, because he asked, “Are you upset?”

  I nodded. “My grandfather just died.”

  “I mean angry.”

  “I seem angry?” He nodded. “Maybe I’m tired.”

  “Tired?” He looked at his watch.

  I tensed with irritation. Maybe I was angry, I thought, although I wasn’t sure why. He searched my face for a few moments then stood. “All right. It’s best I get in the wind anyway. Before some kid takes off with my hubcaps.”

  At the door he added, “Don’t blow it off, okay? Spend a little time with Jim.” I didn’t know why it meant so much to him that he’d had to repeat it. I promised I would.

  I went to the window and watched as Pop eased the Bean Can out of the space. I considered calling Agathe to tell her the news and went to the phone. She and my grandfather had liked each other, something she chalked up to the fact that they were both West Indian immigrants. They’d gotten to know each other while we were living with Grandpa in his brownstone, on the top floor, which he’d conv
erted to a separate apartment. We’d moved out to Queens when I was five or six, but still went to Brooklyn regularly to visit him, Agathe always bringing him her accras de morue. He’d also grown up eating codfish cakes. I decided to put off calling my mother, whom I hadn’t spoken to in months. There was a lot of tension between us that had been there since Helene’s funeral more than a decade earlier. I was still angry about the things she’d said at the airport the day after the service.

  I thought about calling Robbie, but decided not to. He would’ve dropped whatever he was doing to come console me, and I didn’t want to impose on him that way. There was no one else in the city for me to call up, no one to speak to who would’ve known my grandfather. There was a specific reason for that, which I’ll get into a little later if I remember. I dialed Peggy Simpson’s number; she’d been my roommate at Quantico and was with the LA field office. No answer. I called Shannon, a special agent I’d befriended while I was in Indiana; her phone also rang out. I put the receiver back in the cradle.

  Overwhelmed with need, with sadness, with gutting loneliness, I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of rum down from the cabinet above the refrigerator. Poured myself a large glass, then went to the living room. I turned on the television, sat on the sofa, and pulled the basket of locks toward me.

  5

  NEW YORK, 1962

  IN SPY STORIES, THE QUESTION OF what becomes of a spy’s cover after it’s no longer needed is rarely discussed. But we were still there. We still existed. And I can tell you exactly what we were after our mother left. We were terrified. The fall after Agathe’s departure was one of the most frightening of my life. Nuclear war preoccupied my mind, my sister’s mind, the minds of all of our friends. None of us expected to see adulthood. More than just being convinced we were going to die, we knew we would be annihilated (as Robbie referred to it with such relish that the word still gives me the creeps), which to me meant being somehow deader than dead.